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Believe it or not, airports — not so long ago — were exotic places you could roam around in freely, pressing your nose against glass windows that the aircraft practically touched. They were a touch mysterious, practically foreign soil. And they had an aura of far-flung adventure.

Relatives who saw you off on the big day might even leave their cars near the terminal door for an hour or so; about 20 minutes before departure, you ambled toward your gate, where security consisted of a couple of questions, if that. You could buy a bottle of liquor or a carton of smokes at the duty-free shop and lug them on the plane.

You walked out of the terminal onto the tarmac and there, in its full splendour, sat the gleaming jet. You climbed up the gangway.

On board, there were crêpes flambées at 35,000 feet in a pressurized cabin, champagne in glass flutes, wine in wine glasses, steak dinners, served on porcelain, that you ate with real cutlery, and after-dinner cigars. In the romantic days of air travel in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, white-gloved flight attendants served free drinks to passengers dressed to kill.

These were also the days of National Airlines’ infamous 1971 TV ad campaign: “Hi, I’m Cheryl. Fly me.” Playboy magazine was a risqué staple on board Air Canada (and kept disappearing for some reason, noted Ottawa author Peter Pigott, who is writing a history of the Montreal airline).

Flight attendants were expected to light cigarettes for passengers and schmooze with them, the majority of whom were businessmen — although at least they were no longer fired for being married or pregnant. Pigott recalls the flight attendants’ paper uniforms on TWA, the Air Strip on Braniff (where stewardesses suggestively shed layers of clothing, but only up to a point) and the little black books Eastern Airlines flight attendants handed out to male passengers to write down the stewardesses’ phone numbers.

After landing, passengers retrieved their baggage — primitive airport technology meant that most checked bags actually met up with their owners at destination — and breezed through customs, then considered a quaint formality.

It was all very languid and unhurried, say old-timers, who felt they were part of an exclusive fraternity, almost like time travellers.

It’s wrong to claim air travel was a joy for all then — largely because it was for a select few, very expensive, unsafe and not particularly fast. Early on, Europe was 12 hours away on a four-propeller Super Constellation and you were nearly deaf by the time you got there — and possibly hoarse from the cigarette and cigar smoke. Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, the industry was plagued by hijackings.

But for those who had the means to fly in those three decades, the relaxed, pampered feel of air travel was not accidental.

Pilots are called captains to this day because airlines were then vying for business with transatlantic liners — hence the navy blue or black uniforms that resemble those of naval officers.

And it appeared for all the world as though the airline industry’s genteel modus operandi, floating above the hurly-burly of daily life, would last indefinitely.

In a CBC interview in 1960, Gordon McGregor, the president of Trans-Canada Air Lines (which had become Air Canada in French in 1954 but became so named in English only in 1965), foresaw a time very close at hand when passengers would climb aboard a dedicated airport monorail downtown, check themselves and their luggage in while they are whisked directly to the appropriate airport gate, transfer immediately onto the aircraft and be airborne — all of this “in a matter of minutes from the leaving of a downtown city centre” (you can listen to the three-minute interview at http://ow.ly/hJkEN). McGregor, one of the young pilots immortalized by Winston Churchill as saviours after fighting in the Battle of Britain and on D-Day, was the highly respected airline president between 1948 and 1968.

But that prediction was as accurate as the Mayan calendar.

It never got remotely close to McGregor’s dream, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. ushered in a new era of total security that has slowed the smooth flow of passenger traffic and raised considerably the collective blood pressure of air travellers — and airline employees.

Even getting to Dorval’s Pierre Trudeau International Airport, a sleepy airport by world standards, can be a fist-clenching experience around the Dorval circle, which is finally being rebuilt.

Once at an airport, you need to unload fast or face whistles by security, or you park for a goodly sum.

After you’ve battled your way into the terminal, tagged your baggage, checked in at the electronic kiosk and paid fees for the privilege of bringing baggage, excess luggage, assigned seats, your child’s stroller, etc., it’s time for the line shuffles; this line, that line, dump your own bag on the belt, go through security, then customs, wait some more at the gate to board, wait yet more in the jetway and still some more once seated.

The glamour of flying has faded in smaller but telling ways as well.

Now it’s common to board, fly 12 hours and disembark, all without setting eyes on the aircraft that brought you so far.

Peanuts and coffee are free, but any other drink or morsel of food will require your credit card — cash is not an option on many carriers, including Calgary’s WestJet Airlines Ltd. and Air Canada.

Much of the nickel-and-diming of passengers is laid at the feet of soaring fuel costs. But as Robert Mark, publisher of Jetwhine.com dedicated to aviation, notes, airlines have lost more money in the aggregate over the last 30 years than they’ve made — most of that time when fuel was dirt cheap.

Sure, there were a few excesses — like the topless showgirls who, um, entertained passengers on a Modern Air flight from Berlin to Paris on Father’s day in 1970. But that lasted one flight.

Sexism is out, but not sex. Richard Branson’s wink-wink suggestion that passengers on his Virgin Airlines engage in mile-high hanky-panky is one of the occasional attempts to restore the fun of flying, although that falls more under the heading of naughtiness than glamour.

The flip side of the nostalgia for all that civility, slow tempo and relaxed atmosphere is that flying has been democratized since the U.S. airline industry was deregulated in 1978.

Suddenly, carriers could fly from Minneapolis to San Diego directly, bypassing expensive hubs like Chicago or New York, or Quebec City to Toronto, bypassing Montreal. Perhaps inevitably, a slew of low-cost operators like JetBlue and Spirit Airlines have jumped in, shaking up a traditionally stodgy industry.

Those discount airlines’ rock-bottom operating cost structure — no unions and generally one aircraft type — has wreaked havoc with legacy carriers struggling mightily to catch up or stay afloat. Air Canada, for instance, is launching its own low-cost Rouge division on July 1 and will soon offer premium economy seating; roomier than the Y-class sardine seating, but not quite business-level — a tricky balancing act to entice economy clients to pay a little more while not forcing mass defections from business-class customers, who subsidize many flights.

Decent video quality on seatback screens hardly makes up for the teeth-grinding experience of today’s air travel — most of which has nothing to do with airlines but with government security regulations.

For the consumer, though, all the turmoil is a boon. Air travel has exploded, so to speak. Flying has never been cheaper or more plentiful. Montrealers long ago abandoned must-do routines like Florida in winter and Paris in summer as cutthroat airline competition makes South America, Asia and the Middle East, in particular, affordable and within reach. People you know talk about foggy Machu Picchu, Dubai’s glitter and the waterfront Bund in Shanghai the way they used to talk about Fort Lauderdale’s beaches or the Champs Élysées.

You may have missed out on the glory and fun of flying as it once was. But you are pretty well guaranteed to find a seat on a flight within minutes of searching on Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia or the plethora of travel websites. And your upfront costs can be remarkably low, especially in Europe: a return flight from London Gatwick to Barcelona — on British Airways, no less — from March 20-27, for example, costs about 100 pounds ($167). On discount carrier Ryanair? 62.99 pounds or under $100, including an administration fee, but excluding a bevy of charges, fees and surcharges that can double that initial cost on the Dublin-based airline renowned for its cheapness — including a possible fee eventually for using the toilets.

’Twas not always thus. And the allure of the good old days wanes considerably when confronted with the cold reality of a few decades ago.

Voyages Professionels travel agent Marcelle Jarry, who began in the 1970s, recalled that “there were three prices then: first class, business class and economy. We learned the prices by heart at the beginning of the season because there weren’t many destinations. For, say, Paris, it was $1,500 on weekends and $900 on weekdays. That was from June to September. Prices didn’t budge.”

“And it’s not as if you could go across the street to the other travel agent. They had the same prices.”

Roberte Dupuis, in the business since 1975, said that “to buy a ticket, you had to walk into a travel agency, too, or telephone. No email or fax.”

Joel Ostrov, senior officer of Montreal’s Vision 2000, who began in the business in 1971 and founded his own agency in 1977, said that “back then, you were appointed by every single airline. There was no clearing house (that issued tickets until Montreal’s International Air Travel Association, the airline association, became that clearing house).”

“We went to a cabinet with blank Air Canada tickets, Eastern Airlines tickets, Pan Am, TWA, what have you. And you had to call each one to find the best suitable flight.”

“It sometimes took two days of research before you could give someone an answer,” said Ostrov. “Now, about 70 per cent of our transactions are done by email — and we guarantee an answer within one hour.”

“But back then you couldn’t even fax yet, so we’d call back the client and read out the itinerary on the phone — ‘write this down.’ They’d have to come in and give you a cheque or cash — no credit cards over the phone.”

“We’d handwrite the ticket and every two weeks, you’d have to report and send a cheque to each airline for the tickets you sold.”

The tickets themselves were thick, mini-folders of several pages — a world away from today’s paperless tickets.

“Actually,” Ostrov recalled, “Air Canada had what it called the world’s first computerized reservation system.”

Reservec was launched in 1953 but became operational only in 1962.

“It was great for the time,” Ostrov said. “It had access to other airlines. We had (the basic terminal) in the middle of the office for five of us. It was on a swivel and we all took turns using it.”

One indisputably improved aspect of flying today is the most important, safety. It has never been safer to fly, with 2012 being the safest year on record, edging out 2011 — the previous safest year — by 20 per cent, noted Paul Hayes, director of air safety and insurance for Ascend, a FlightGlobal advisory service used by the world’s aviation authorities.

“Airline safety is continuing to improve rapidly,” Hayes wrote in a report last month. “The industry, on average, probably becomes twice as safe about every 10 years while traffic growth globally is only forecast to be between perhaps 3 and 4 per cent a year over the next 10 years. So, on average, we might expect about 30 per cent fewer fatal accidents a year by 2023.”

After 2012’s bar-setting performance, one crash can scramble the stats for one or even two years, but taken over longer periods, safety improvements will continue, Hayes added.

But there is a darker side to all the cheap travel. Regional and local carriers have sprung up, some of them employing cut-rate staff, including pilots the airlines train poorly, making the airline industry less safe, according to a top official at Montreal’s International Civil Aviation Organization.

Today’s aircraft systems have multiple redundancies, but the Colgan Air crash in Buffalo, when the pilot misinterpreted several warnings and repeatedly reacted the wrong way, shows that safety on smaller airlines has a long way to go, the official said.

Canada’s airline sector is set to undergo a major transformation in the next few years: Air Canada is launching a low-cost group to battle Montreal wholesaler Transat A.T. and Toronto’s Sunwing Travel Group on sun and European destinations; it is also intensifying its presence on regional routes, a market it has long been accused of neglecting; regional carrier Porter Airlines is countering by expanding at a rapid clip; WestJet is attacking on several fronts, launching a regional division with an all-Bombardier turboprop fleet, à la Porter, and going after package deal wholesalers like Sunwing and Transat — and Air Canada; and Transat is launching its own smaller division with a new aircraft type for thinner routes.

The so-called glamour days of air travel may be gone, but that coming battle promises to bring its own rewards.